What if Logitech pulls the plug

[erland]

Fortunately, the music world is not going in the direction of an Apple mono-culture. Actually the real trend is towards UPnP / DLNA. All the major audio/video consumer device manufacturers (think of the big names like Sony, Samsung, Philips, LG, Denon etc.) already support it. It is an open interworking standard so anyone can use it without paying royalties or risking legal disputes.

Ok admittedly some manufacturers (including Logitech) did not master the UPnP technology, and some implementations are still quite quirky; but on balance all the major manufacturers are using it, learning from their mistakes, and continuously improving their offerrings. Indeed even Microsoft supports UPnP. So basically it is Apple vs. R-o-W, and it is stacking up to become yet-another format war like Blu-Ray vs. HDDVD, however in this case I am putting my money on UPnP...

Can you give some concrete examples of UPnP based players with decent (non IR) remote controls that gives me a browsing experience similar to either Squeezebox or a Apple solution ?

I've tried some UPnP server and I've also tried some remote controls, all have either been very limited or very buggy or very user unfriendly and this is simply not acceptable in my listening room. However, it might just be me that haven't found the good/working implementations.

Do you have any recommendations regarding good and working:
- iPad based UPnP remote control
- Android tablet based UPnP remote control
- A good UPnP server working on Windows
- A good UPnP server working on Linux
- A good UPnP server working on OSX
- A good UPnP server working on Sheevaplug or other similar devices with restricted resources
- A UPnP player similar to Squeezebox Radio
- A UPnP player similar to Squeezebox Touch

I would love if UPnP (or any standard) would get a broad acceptance and provide the user experience I want, unfortunately the only solutions that offers that kind of user experience seems to be based more or less on proprietary protocols (Squeezebox, Apple, Sonos, ...)

From what I've seen UPnP have two major problems (unless I've misunderstood something):
- It's very complex, because it tries to support a lot, which causes more or less all implementations to be buggy or incompatible in some way.
- It requires the remote control (if it's UPnP based) to be powered on all the time, which uses a lot of battery on a smart phone/tablet based control. The reason for this is that the controller is the one that controls the playlist and instruct the player which track to play next.

[pippin]

If you want to make an assertion like that, you have to provide us with specifics. { IMHO, as in a court of law, your assertion is wrong until proven otherwise. }

No, it's just my opinion after spending quite a bit of time on the topic over the last year. It's overly complex, uses badly performing interfaces like SOAP and the architecture is 1990ish not taking into account the realities of today's world. I especially do not believe that it's possible to do a well-performing controller-renderer model that does not have the CP on either the server or the renderer. I know there are extensions that would help but they are being supported by close to nobody.

I know good people who have tried hard to do multiroom-synchronization with UPnP and who have failed and reverted to proprietary solutions instead.

At best it's a data source protocol. Which is why it works for video where this is actually all you need. No need for gapless transitions between movies and you also rarely queue up dozens of them at a time. Plus your CP is usually on the renderer, after all, you do already have a screen.

No. Most of them don't suck. But many of them are very shoddy, I suspect mostly because the coders did not RTFM well enough before starting to cut code. (Been there, done that.)

Sorry, English being not my mother tongue I fail to fully get the subtle semantics of "is shoddy but doesn't suck".
Actually I don't believe this is due to incapable programmers. System faults are often put on the developers. Maybe I'm wrong and out of coincidence, all capable remote control programmers came to decide to develop for systems like the Squeezebox and all the bad ones happened to develop UPnP remotes but I don't believe that's the case.

There's also a reason why CE companies do these bad implementations of their renderers and "out of coincidence" this reason is the same that kind of let down the Squeezebox product range over the last years: Software cost has to be calculated on the piece-price of the device which is something that simply doesn't work for products which have their functionality mainly defined through software or even backend services.
I could no go on and elaborate for a few hours why this is also why Apple and Microsoft make so much money but that would certainly be a bit OT here....

DLNA will go away.

[tamanaco]

As been said here, UPnP for video is fine if you keep away from large video playlists or very large categorized video libraries as I assume most people do... but for large categorized (carefully tagged) music libraries with long playlists the DLNA indexing mechanism leaves a lot to be desired. Searching using the tags is also limitted. I own a Revue (Logitech Google TV) and use a subset of my music library in MP3 format derived from my main FLAC library so that my wife can listen to music using the TV. I tried and failed to maintain a "reliable" music playing setup using a UPnP/DLNA players and servers. I tried LMS with the DLNA server enabled and with the Whitebear server (Whitebear being very reliable), but always found issues related to the UPnP players being unable to maintain a reliable index of the library. Using the Windows Media Player from a PC proved to be the most reliable. If another of my Windows computers with the DLNA server enabled entered the network the players (LMP, aVia, GTVBox) in the Revue would sometimes associate with the Windows computers instead of the LMS server. Indexing would have to be started from scratch every time some communication issue occurred or whenever indexing glitches came up during simple library updates... like adding a new album. Of course, this would always happen when my wife had friends over and wanted to play some music using the Revue. I found that most of players that I tried lacked a settings granularity flexible enough to allow me to display and search my library as I wanted. To make a long story short, I opted to upload my MP3 library to the Google cloud and use Google Music as a player in the Revue instead. It took a long time to upload, but no more indexing issues. The library is rendered quickly with all its album art and all the main tags are displayed correctly.

[AndrewFG]

No, it's just my opinion after spending quite a bit of time on the topic over the last year. It's overly complex, uses badly performing interfaces like SOAP and the architecture is 1990ish not taking into account the realities of today's world.

Well, I have spent more than a "bit of time" on it; more like ten years (which probably explains why it is "1990ish"). And yes, it does take hard work to master the protocol; you need to actually read the documents; and you need to make an effort...

I especially do not believe that it's possible to do a well-performing controller-renderer model that does not have the CP on either the server or the renderer. I know there are extensions that would help but they are being supported by close to nobody.

I suppose belief is a matter of religion. The architecture considers three entities, the CP, the DMS and the DMR. Each such entity may be either on the same machine, or on another machine. The physical location does not make any difference...

I know good people who have tried hard to do multiroom-synchronization with UPnP and who have failed and reverted to proprietary solutions instead.

I don't doubt they are good people. If you want to do multi-player sync in UPnP then you have to either A) implement the UPnP push streaming model, and or B) implement the SyncPlay(), SyncStop() and SyncPause() actions. Your "good" people seem to be implementing the UPnP pull streaming model (HTTP GET), and also implementing only the (non sync'ed) Play(), Stop() and Pause() actions. And these good people then start to yammer about UPnP not supporting sync'ed play... C'mon, get real!!

At best it's a data source protocol. Which is why it works for video where this is actually all you need. No need for gapless transitions between movies and you also rarely queue up dozens of them at a time. Plus your CP is usually on the renderer, after all, you do already have a screen.

As mentioned before, the location of the CP is irrelevant. And, I am sorry to say it, but the gapless play " issue" comes back down to your "good" people. If you want to do gapless play in UPnP, then you need to implement both the SetAvTransportUri() action AND the SetAvNextTransportUri() action. Anyone who ignores implementing the SetAvNextTransportUri() action, (or who does not even know what it means), has no authority to yammer about UPnP not supporting gapless playback.

And, by the way, in case you raise the "issue" that UPnP does not support playlists, let me correct you. In UPnP a CP can send (for example) an .M3U playlist to a DMR using the SetAvTransportUri() action; and the DMR can then autonomously play through that playlist (gaplessly) even if the CP goes away...

DLNA will go away.

I am betting it won't...

[bluegaspode]

Andrew,

how many UPnP renderers do you know, which fully support the specification, so that people can really enjoy sync + gapless playback?

I only had one encounter of UPnP, which was my Samsung TV where I wasn't able to play a single song of my library. And a program called plugplayer, which crashed multiple times and seemed to be very slow.
I only tested with LMS (and the integrated UPnP server of the FritzBox) though - so maybe Logitech is to blame for my bad experience.

[pippin]

Well, I have spent more than a "bit of time" on it; more like ten years (which probably explains why it is "1990ish"). And yes, it does take hard work to master the protocol; you need to actually read the documents; and you need to make an effort...

Believe me, I read the specs. Most of them at least. And I did make an effort. I even implemented some of the more obscure parts of the spec myself, I know it quite a bit by now.

I suppose belief is a matter of religion. The architecture considers three entities, the CP, the DMS and the DMR. Each such entity may be either on the same machine, or on another machine. The physical location does not make any difference...

That's what the theory and the spec says. Real life, however, says that you want to have your CP OFF for 99% of the time and that doesn't work with DLNA, at least not with how it's implemented in >>99% of the renderers and a "standard" which has it's implementation fail in >>99% of the installations IMHO is a failed standard. Yes, you can call this religious.

I don't doubt they are good people. If you want to do multi-player sync in UPnP then you have to either A) implement the UPnP push streaming model, and or B) implement the SyncPlay(), SyncStop() and SyncPause() actions. Your "good" people seem to be implementing the UPnP pull streaming model (HTTP GET), and also implementing only the (non sync'ed) Play(), Stop() and Pause() actions.

Nope. They started just like you and then they learned that life, unfortunately, is not according to the spec and scrapped it after puttin g a lot of work into it.

The spec says

The pre-condition is that the different MediaServers and MediaRenderers in the home are synchronized to the same master clock and support the appropriate clock synchronization protocol (such as NTP, IEEE 802.1AS).

which equals to "Our spec is perfect. It's your job, dear developer, through the use of unobtainium, to guarantee the ridiculous preconditions we set for this system to work. If you just do that, you will see that it works perfectly".

Apart from that even this is not true because there is no way in the protocol to compensate for clock drift which would even be an issue if you managed to actively synchronize your clocks because this very synchronization requires you to re-sync the audio, too.

Push streaming, btw, is another case of "unobtainium". I'm not talking theoretical setups here, I'm talking real world CE devices.

Name one implementation where this works.

C'mon, get real!!

[86atc250r]

Sorry to get away from the UPnP / DLNA discussion but.....

If Logitech was to pull the plug on mysqueezebox.com, I'm guessing there's enough programming talent and motivation in the community that a workable solution to mysqueezebox.com would become a reality pretty quickly if push came to shove. Who knows where it might go from there.... I've seen it happen in smaller communities already. The geeks will find a solution, we always do.

What a great platform. I can't believe after all these years, there still isn't really anything that touches the flexibility of these boxes in allowing me to listen to what I want, how I want.

[korny@sietsma.com]

Jumping in here, because I lost my Squeezebox in a breakup, so have been
playing with UPnP a bit (it seems I'd have to spend $500 on a Squeezebox
Touch if I wanted to go back to Squeezeboxes? Seems like paying a lot for
features I don't really need)

Anyway, I've been pretty impressed by how many things actually do DNLA/UPnP
quite well:

- The DNLA server on my Synology NAS is very nice, works well, an
impressive web-based UI, and has managed to serve up pretty well all
content I throw at it.

- The UPnP player built in to my TV (Samsung something) is rubbish and
would play almost nothing

- I bought a $130 WD-TV player, and it does all things UPnP quite nicely,
happily streams 1080p movies to my TV. Audio browsing is OK, not anywhere
as good as the SqueezeServer of course.

- It turns out my amplifier has a built in audio-only UPnP player, which is
neat (It's a Pioneer VSX-921) - it plays audio nicely, without needing a TV
running (a limitation of the WD-TV). The interface is poor, but I can
control it pretty well from my tablet (more on this below).

- I also have a FritzBox modem but haven't tried it's UPnP server because I
haven't had the need.

- I have a Galaxy Tab (android tablet), I've tried two players, Bubble UPnP
and UPnPlay - both seem to work OK, for streaming low-def video and audio,
and also to control other devices - this is how I play music on my amp,
using UPnPlay to queue up music. HD video seems to not work so well, not
sure if it's a bandwidth issue or decoding speed.

- I haven't found a decent UPnP player for my Macbook - VLC has one but it
crashes trying to browse my server.

The big things I miss from the SqueezeBox are:
- iTunes playlist integration - haven't found a way to get the NAS to
recognize my iTunes playlists yet
- The UIs are useable, but pretty poor compared to SlimServer / the
Squeezebox.

(I have my old slimp3 in a box somewhere - tempted to see if it still
works, it might be all I need)

- Korny

On 26 June 2012 07:50, bluegaspode <
bluegaspode.5eqj4n (AT) no-mx (DOT) ...limdevices.com> wrote:

>
> Andrew,
>
> how many UPnP renderers do you know, which fully support the
> specification, so that people can really enjoy sync + gapless playback?
>
> I only had one encounter of UPnP, which was my Samsung TV where I wasn't
> able to play a single song of my library. And a program called
> plugplayer, which crashed multiple times and seemed to be very slow.
> I only tested with LMS (and the integrated UPnP server of the FritzBox)
> though - so maybe Logitech is to blame for my bad experience.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> bluegaspode's Profile:
> http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=31651
> View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=95603
>
>

[erland]

So, just to investigate this a bit further, to make sure I don't make any conclusions based on guesses.

My current setup looks like this:
- A Squeezebox Radio in my bedroom which is used as alarm clock in the mornings and listening to music while going to sleep or waking up. Automatic turn of after a certain interval in the evening is nice but powering on and playing music at a specific time in the morning is a must. I mostly listen to dynamic smart playlists playing either random tracks from the favorite parts of my library or random tracks among those recently purchased. It's always controlled with the buttons on the Radio itself, never from a remote control as those tends to be somewhere else when the alarm triggers in the morning and I don't want to get out of the bed.
- A Squeezebox Touch in the listening room connected via analogue connections to the Sherwood receiver (neither supports AirPlay nor UPnP). This player is controlled either with a Harmony IR remote or an iPad, IR remote if I just want to play a smart playlist and iPad if I want to browse the library and try to find something specific to play.
- A Squeezebox Boom in the kitchen which is used now and then to play music, both smart playlists and specific albums. Sometimes controlled with the buttons directly on the Boom but mostly using an iPad or iPhone.

(I've more players than the ones described above, but it's only the above ones I consider to be critical)

- Audio quality is important in listening room but less important in the other rooms.
- Available space is restricted in bedroom and kitchen, so the devices in these rooms can't be much bigger than the Radio and Boom I have today.
- All players needs to be able to play both files on my central NAS (QNAP) and Spotify tracks, currently it's handled via a Linux server running LMS.
- The local files on the NAS are all in FLAC format, so support for FLAC is a must.
- I rarely sync players, it sometimes happens between kitchen and listening room but this is not a critical functionality for me.
- The setup needs to be stable and I rarely have crashes in the current setup and I like to keep that situations. Reboots/restarts with an interval of a month or so is ok as I do this already today when upgrading server software or player firmware.
- Support for Internet radio except for Spotify is nice but not a must, support for Spotify is a strict requirement.
- Gapless playback is nice but not a strict requirement.
- I don't want to be forced to turn on TV to listen to music in the listening room, the kitchen and bedroom doesn't even have a TV so there a TV controlled devices isn't even an option.
- Regarding smart playlists it doesn't need to be that advanced but as a minimum I need to be able to:
-- Exclude tracks I rarely want to hear but still want to keep in my library
-- Restrict the playlist to tracks added during the last two months

For my personal setup any software have to run either on Mac or Linux as that's all I have, but let's not restrict the answers to this as Windows still is pretty popular as desktop/laptop computers among other users.


Now, let's say I would like to replace all this setup with something completely based on UPnP, are there any recommendations from someone that believes in UPnP and know it's possible to accomplish something that works with UPnP ?
Is it even possible to accomplish something similar with a UPnP based solution ?
In that case what hardware/software do I need to get ?

Don't restrict the answers to what I currently have, to make it easy let's assume I don't have anything and want to accomplish a system like described above based on UPnP.

[AndrewFG]

Now, let's say I would like to replace all this setup with something completely based on UPnP, are there any recommendations from someone that believes in UPnP and know it's possible to accomplish something that works with UPnP ?
Is it even possible to accomplish something similar with a UPnP based solution ?
In that case what hardware/software do I need to get ?

Well, I would suggest two solutions:

Case A. If you want a pure UPnP only environment:
- Use J. River Media Center as your main media server and Control Point
- Use whatever UPnP hardware players that take your fancy. You could select from some of the previous poster's suggestions, or look at J. River's "Media Network" forums for discussions about what players work and what do not.

Case B. If you want to keep your Squeezeboxes and add UPnP players and/or Control Points too:
- Use LMS as your main media server
- Use Whitebear i) to integrate your LMS media library into the UPnP world, and ii) to integrate your Squeeze Players into the UPnP world.

In both of the above cases, you can have one (or more) tablet or PC based Control Point applications. In case B you need at least one Control Point application. If you are in the Windows world you can use Windows Media Player 12, Asset Control, J. River (used as Control Point only), or Kinsky. Another candidate that I know about, but do not use is XBMC. If you are in the tablet world, there are many choices depending on what OS your machine runs. On the iPad I have Kinsky loaded and also PlugPlay (but to be honest I use iPeng to control the Squeezeplayers directly). Also the previous poster has suggested a few other UPnP Control Points for tablets.

I admit that Whitebear is Windows platform specific. Personally I use a small Atom based black box Windows machine (a Shuttle) that runs LMS and Whitebear.

Note that there are basically two types of Control Points:

a) A few Control Points (the only examples that I know of are J. River and WMP12) create a local image of the attributes of your library. Such CPs create their own browsing experience and have more powerful sorting and searching tools. But when first run, they take a while to browse through your whole library (in a background process) to create the local attributes image of the library. Obviously the local image requires some memory.

b) Other Control Points (almost any other one than the above mentioed) use a dynamic page-by-page tree based browse algorithm. In such CPs, the browse tree is structured by the server. In the case of Whitebear, it presents the standard LMS top level browse tree Artists, Albums, Genres, Years, Folders, PlayLists, etc. including whatever Favorites and Playlists you may have defined using the Logitech standard UI. And it also has an option (admittedly normally turned off) to present the standard LMS Add-Ins folders (Radio, Podcasts, Apps) in its browse tree. These CPs don't store anything locally (browse tree pages are served one-by-one) and so they can run on light weight machines like phones or tablets. Here is a screenshot from (for example) Kinsky:



If you specifically want gapless playback then J. River (acting as either Control Point or main library server) plus Whitebear (front end to the Squeeze players) are to be recommended.